When someone gives away their content with advertising attached to it, they are gambling on one important thing and if they screw it up, they are out of business. Media outlets lost sight of this and it cost them money and readership. Ad blockers aren’t the problem at all.

I promise you that ad blockers aren’t hurting media companies as much as much as they hurt themselves with poor management of their own business. I don’t see ad blockers as immoral.

I see them as a signal that media companies don’t know how to run their own business to deliver meaningful value to readers and advertisers.

I wouldn't mind showing ads if they would fully look at each and every single one making sure none of them had virus' or malware attached. They also need to start being smart about it, 2 ads at the top and bottom of a page is plenty enough but many websites will stick them wherever they have a free space. That slows loading times down and is seriously annoying. So I use ABP or similar add-ons to help with that. Sorry if it costs them a few dollars but the safety of my PC and it's contents are more important than them getting a little bit of money each time I see their website.

tuongtndg wrote:When someone gives away their content with advertising attached to it, they are gambling on one important thing and if they screw it up, they are out of business. Media outlets lost sight of this and it cost them money and readership. Ad blockers aren’t the problem at all.

I promise you that ad blockers aren’t hurting media companies as much as much as they hurt themselves with poor management of their own business. I don’t see ad blockers as immoral.

I see them as a signal that media companies don’t know how to run their own business to deliver meaningful value to readers and advertisers.

idk. i personally feel it's not. it's like their business model is based on shoving ads down others' throats, which isn't really moral to begin with but still, a decent model until adblock came along that's always been te case with nature, adblock is just the bigger fish.

demonicvampiregirl wrote:I wouldn't mind showing ads if they would fully look at each and every single one making sure none of them had virus' or malware attached. They also need to start being smart about it, 2 ads at the top and bottom of a page is plenty enough but many websites will stick them wherever they have a free space. That slows loading times down and is seriously annoying. So I use ABP or similar add-ons to help with that. Sorry if it costs them a few dollars but the safety of my PC and it's contents are more important than them getting a little bit of money each time I see their website.

Your comments really hit the nail on the head in terms of why I installed ABP. Several months ago, the Forbes web site started serving up third party ads which contained links to web pages which would try to automatically install malware. I immediately informed them about this. It took them a while to verify that some of the third party ads which were automatically being displayed on their web site did indeed link to web pages which used techniques to try to install malware on my computer. Yet fortunately my AV program caught and blocked all such attempts, which I verified by running full scans with three other stand-alone AV scanners. One stand-alone scanner detects any unidentified thread which is running on a computer.

Note that I had disabled ABP on the Forbes web site because the Forbes web site programmers had done a really job of making sure that all ads were unobtrusive in terms of their position and design, and because it appeared that Forbes was implementing ABP's definitions for what would be acceptable versus unacceptable ads. In fact and several months ago, I not only commended them for this, but also asked them to never get rid of their Quote Of The Day since some of those quotes have been very thought provoking.

Thus for months I had ABP disabled on the Forbes web site since it appeared that they were doing everything "right," in comparison and for example the LA Times web site. The LA Times web site was a nightmare to view without ABP enabled, and had annoying delays in terms of loading the content for the web page. In other words, the LA Times web was and still is doing everything wrong in terms of what I find acceptable with regards to advertisements.

The issue with the Forbes web site was that even though they were following ABP's best practices for the types of acceptable ads, Forbes was not vetting the third party ads in order to assure that the third party ads did not either contain malware or to assure that such third party ads did not redirect to web pages which did contain malware or phishing attempts. Thus, I turned back on ABP's blocking for all ads on the Forbes web site.

The upshot is that third party advertising on any web site, if not vetted by the web site owner, may contain "bad stuff." This is exactly what happened on the Forbes web site. More disturbing is how long it took them to realize this, yet at least they eventually did. I guess that is why ABP came up with this new feature to allow compliant advertising, yet at the same time to block third party advertising since for the latter, there always will be some bad apples in the barrel. So starting today, I decided to try ABP's latest settings of allowing acceptable ads in conjunction with only allowing ads without third party tracking. In other words, only ads which are hosted on the given web site. Here, my logic is that ads which are hosted by the actual web site which I am visiting, have hopefully been reviewed by the web site's programmers since if the ad is actually hosted on their server(s), then they have much greater liability since it will their own server(s) which are serving up malware.

As mentioned, I have been testing for only one day. I will see how this goes. I, like you, would not mind ads being shown which might interest me. Yet on the other hand, I have zero tolerance for third party advertising which either contains malware or which links to web pages which either serve up malware or which are phishing attempts.

I was thinking about the same question regarding YouTube. Especially the small channels might need the viewers consuming ads to build up their channels. But as a viewer, it's just so disturbing to watch a video and in the middle of a sentence the video stops and you need to watch an ad...